And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

And Ruth said, “Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.

The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.

Stately words, those, their cadences pleasing to the eye and ear. Dangerous words, too. They were written in English at the beginning of the 17th century, shaped by a committee of 54 biblical scholars, translators, linguists, and editors under the protection of King James I of Scotland and England, who had commissioned a new Bible accessible to anyone in the British realm—anyone, that is, who could read, then a small but growing portion of the population. Published 400 years ago today, the words of the King James Version, as it is called, in turn shaped the way English was spoken and written for generations afterward, and anyone today who has even nodding familiarity with the history of English literature, if not the Bible itself, carries within hundreds of moments rendered in that vigorous speech.

The words were dangerous because, in those days, it was deemed heresy to render the words of the Bible in the vernacular. The first man to translate the Bible into English, John Wyclif (or Wycliffe), did so secretly. Even so, he was found out. He died before he could be killed, in 1384, but English clerics dug up his bones and burned them all the same. (They burned his millennarian disciple, Jan Hus, too.) William Tyndale, whose translations from a century before served as the basis of the King James Version, was burned at the stake in 1536. The scholar Guy Davenport notes that among Tyndale’s crimes were to render ekklesia as “congregation” rather than as “church,” presbyteros as “elder” rather than as “priest,” providing textual support for the Reformation that was raging across Europe and contributing to the splintering of the monolithic Catholic Church into hundreds of descendant, often inimical strains of Christianity. And Tyndale was not alone: by the time James’s committee of 54 unveiled their work after seven years’ close work, more than 50 English Bibles had been published.

But those 54 prevailed, and brilliantly, for, as Gordon Campbell observes in his recently published book Bible: The Story of the King James Version, “it would be difficult now to bring together a group of more than fifty scholars with the range of languages and knowledge of other disciplines that characterized the KJV translators.” He adds, with a nicely paradoxical twist: “We may live in a world with more knowledge, but it is populated by people with less knowledge.” So it is, and so it is that the King James Version is the one that held sway for centuries, delighting in language revivified by the still-living poet and playwright William Shakespeare and his contemporaries, giving us phrases that are common today: “fight the good fight,” “the powers that be,” “eat, drink, and be merry,” “the salt of the earth,” “of its own accord.”

The King James Version resonates, though it no longer fulfills in every detail the edict that gave it birth: “His Highness wishes, that some especial pains should be taken in that behalf for one uniform translation … to be read in the whole church, and none other.” Four hundred years on, the Bible has seen other English versions, while countless other sects have been born of it and its interpretation, lending credence to the observation of religious scholar Timothy Beal, in a recent essay, “The Bible keeps reopening theological cans of worms. It resists its own impoverishment by univocality.”

So it does, and today we celebrate the work of those scholars, and their regal patron, in meting out its treasure—literary, linguistic, and cultural as well as theological—to readers of English everywhere.